Kleptomania steals into a woman's life

CINTRA WILSON

Published 4:00 am, Friday, August 9, 1996

CINTRA, I Seek Your Guidance:

If you feel my pain, you have a deep, sore spot that hasn't gone away for too long.

I lived in an apartment complex for some time, but having lost my true love and partner quite unexpectedly, decided to move to the East Coast. Hiring a man and his helper to store furniture, ad infinitum, I went to work every A.M., knowing that they were doing a fine job. What I didn't know was that a woman in a front apartment was watching them pack things onto their truck, and was going down there and helping herself to several boxes while they were staggering back and forth. She and I had had a few casual conversations in the garage, but were not close.

Several months later I returned, rented another apartment in the same town and noticed the loss of books, vases, etc. I assumed they had been stolen at the storage site, knowing the workers were above suspicion, so I just shrugged off the loss.

One day, this former fellow tenant telephoned me and asked if I would meet her downtown along with some other folk. It was raining heavily that day, but I arrived. We gathered together in the lounge, and in a minute somebody came in running with a big white umbrella saying to my ex-neighbor, "Isn't this your umbrella, Helen?" You left it outside!" I recognized it as the umbrella I had been given as a souvenir in Switzerland at Clinic La Prairie, but I didn't say anything about it at that point. However, on the way home, I did say that it was my umbrella. She said that I had given it to her, which I of course had not. She returned the article to me, and I have never mentioned the matter again, preferring to think that she is a hopeless kleptomaniac. I was quite unhappy after this disappointing development.

(Readers - the letter at this point becomes a batch of puzzling stories, wherein letter writer gets burned repeatedly by the klepto again and again: the kleptomaniac requested that she buy a souvenir spoon from Montreal for her "to round out her collection," but did not, in return, buy the writer a Rolling Stones T-shirt when she attended the concert. The rest is an entirely maddening and unintelligible series of events concerning a faulty phone machine, which I could not decipher even with the greatest of empathy.)

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I feel wronged and extremely unhappy. After losing my husband, it's been a lonely world. This is an important issue, I think: Should one continually turn the other cheek? Sincerely - Edy B.

Dearest Edy: In my opinion, you have spent far too much time with this hardened criminal. She is obviously sick and incorrigible. Since the gods do not seem to be executing justice in your favor in regards to this fiend, you need to don the stealthy tunic of vigilantism and execute swift and damning retributions yourself.

Cut the hag loose! Let her know where she can park her walker. But before you do that, you need to break into her house and steal anything you want. Perhaps you can recover several boxes of your possessions, and goods belonging to other neighbors as well! Then you can parade about the streets, jeering, foisting the well-deserved humiliation due this miscreant on her stooped little arthritic shoulders.

While it may be unsurprising that her frail body was unable to fight the lines of fat middle-aged lawyers in order to obtain a Rolling Stones concert-T, the absconding with umbrellas is absolutely unacceptable. You should have grabbed her by the collar and hauled her over the table right there in the lounge! This is what you should do: buy a tight-fiting black catsuit, a Lycra ski-mask, and some nunchakus. Practice loud screams and high kicks in front of the mirror. Kick down her door in the middle of the night, and drag her by the hair out into the middle of the apartment complex lobby.

It will make you feel way better to have a knock down- rag- ut brawl in the parking lot than it would to politely write this cannibal off. Cackle as you swagger about her trembling form, accusing her of her numerous crimes. Threaten her with prison camp. Tear the sleeves off of her housecoat. All of the tenants of her building will clap and praise you lavishly for exposing this thieving mastermind. This will teach her the devastating lesson that she so richly deserves.

If this all seems like a gross expenditure of energy, one can achieve an enormous amount of satisfaction from smaller tortures: roll small smoke bombs under her door regularly. Anonymously mail her boxes of wet garbage. But for God's sake, avenge your losses, or you will spread a message that this kind of behavior is acceptable, then God knows how many underworld characters will lurk among the ranks of our female senior citizens.